


muddy and foxgloved

by catarinquar



Series: series 01 [5]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Episode: s07e10 Sein und Zeit, Post-Episode: s07e11 Closure, Sex, hmmm warning does not apply to all chapters, tags will also be updated along the way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 16:21:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18525181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catarinquar/pseuds/catarinquar
Summary: “I need you,” he growls, there in the rough vicinity of her heart. He's trembling with it, this need, and is that not an easy way to be loved—Dana?“Scully…”-post-en ami, but fromclosurethroughall things.





	muddy and foxgloved

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fic title-not-chapter title stolen from hozier etc etc

He should be in bed, but they're both still here on his couch and in the dark; Mulder's head in her lap and her hands running jagged spikes through his soft, damp hair. It’s been hours since he came back from his post-flight run, but even sniveling, shaking— _s’just from the cold—_ and drenched to the bone, he only conceded to a hot shower when Scully promised she would wash his hair.

 _Yes,_ she insists now, thumb digging into his atlas, teetering on the carven edge of his jawbone, _yes, doctors’ hands are healers’ hands._ Oh, he should be in bed, for his back if for nothing else, but at least when she touches her fingertips to his carotid, his pulse has slowed to a steady thrum; subtle morse code that whispers of the things so hard at work deep within him, _going once, going twice—_

Her eyelids slide closed and there he is: Mulder, opening the front door of the house in Chilmark just as the brass knocker strikes the second time. _Come in,_ he beams, _come in, welcome to the home of the FBI's most unwanted._ She means to tell him how very wanted he is, but then she jerks awake and the travel-sized Casio on the coffee table offers up in neon green numbers its reverse countdown: it’s been hours and hours since they stood under the pin-prick of the shower spray.

Outside, heavy raindrops continue to hammer cacophony against the blinded windows.

At one point that night he’d started sliding down from the chair. Just, sort of—leaned a little further forward, a little further into her, until all she could do was sink to the floor beneath him. _Mulder,_ she said. _You need rest,_ she said. _Please,_ she’d said, and that had been it: he didn't want to sleep, no, didn't want the bed—but the couch would do. _Don't leave, Scully?_ Yes, the couch would do for the both of them as soon as she'd gotten him out of his clothes and into pajama pants; as soon as she herself had slipped into a stolen sweatshirt and washed her formaldehyde hands again, again, again.

She was not supposed to have let it happen, but she had. In fact, she had _made_ it happen. In fact—she’d climbed into his lap and made it happen almost all by herself, so proud of what her body could do for them, and was that not an easy way to love him, _Dana?_ _Dana, Danadanadana_ —yes, she loved this man awash with grief, and she would wash over him in gentle waves. She would give him her whole self, _here, can you feel that?_ _See, let go;_ had cupped his face and let him turn to kiss her palm, her wrist, sucking and nibbling. _Let go,_ she’d chanted, _please, it’s okay, let go,_ until he did, gripping her hips so hard and catching her sleeve between his teeth to keep silent as he shook beneath her.

In the morning, before Skinner showed up, she had thought to retreat, had had… this need again to scrub away a few layers of herself. They’d _said_ they wouldn't—

So, she tugs on that same sleeve now, wishing she'd gotten a pair of joggers, too. It is not just the cold, aquatic glimmer from the fish tank, not just that her thighs are sticking to the leather. It is Mulder’s warm body, the rough stubble of his cheek against her skin when he rolls on his other side and nuzzles closer. The sweatshirt—the same one; his, Oxford-emblazoned, overwashed—has ridden up and so it is his lips branding her bared midriff, his fingers delving under the waistband of her panties.

“Mulder,” she gasps when he drags her down the couch, crawls over her and wraps around her in a whole-body Palmar grasp. She can hardly breathe for his weight on her chest, but his breath is hot and humid on her clavicle. “Mulder,” again, her fingers running down the quivering slope of his latissimi dorsi, climbing up the curved ridge of his spine. Making a gambit cut across the sharp points of his scapulae.

Six days ago, she cut open his mother’s dead body. She’d stood for a while with her scalpel raised as she’d done before her first autopsy in med school. Once she turned on the recorder, once she became Dr. Scully, forensic pathologist, and Teena Mulder became _the deceased, a white female,_ though… it had not been so difficult at all. Wrinkled skin, sagging fatty tissue, smoke-addled lungs, viscera, uterus—there on the cold steel table it could have been the body of any sixty-year-old woman, and yet it was Mulder’s mother with her carcinoma and her damaged liver, reluctant even in death to relinquish her secrets. Scully had weighed her heart and found it heavy beyond measure.

Six days ago, she sewed up Teena Mulder’s dead body, and now she is cradling the woman's son to her own chest as he grapples with her sweatshirt, pushing it up, up, up. “Please,” she begs, and though she won’t herself let go of him to pull it over her head, it seems all the same: he crushes her to him and latches onto her breast with a scrape of teeth that sends sparks ripping through her. “Plea— _ah._ ”

“Need you,” he growls, there in the rough vicinity of her heart, and God, does she know it. The wet grit of his voice alone is enough to liquify her, but he’s rock-hard and grinding against her core; trembling with it, this need, and is that not an easy way to be loved— _Dana?_   “Scully…”

“I’m here,” she gasps, lifting her hips to let him drag her underwear down her legs. She kicks the scrap of cotton off and helps to push his sweats down before reaching between them, stroking him from root to tip.

He groans again, bites hard enough to bruise, and dips two fingers into her to break her whimper. “Jesus, Scully,” he says, voice dripping praise and appraisal even as he withdraws his hand to spread her open, painting a streak of her own arousal along the back of her thigh. He grabs her wrist to remove her hand and lowers himself to enter her, but falters when she cups his face and draws him up. This, she will have: the fault-line flicker behind his eyes, his tongue slipping wet, wet, wet between her lips. Her hamstrings burn. “I _need_ you,” he repeats.

“I _know,_ ” she promises. She knows, too, as she angles her pelvis to take him in, that this will be no slow seduction—but it is fine: locking her ankles high on his back, she is molten. _Yes,_ she insists, _this is what the body does._ “You _have_ me.”

-

The quaking comes after, indeed the aftershocks of this seismic shift that has ripped fissures through the foundation of his belief, his faith, his life—his entire self, Scully supposses; what Mulder for the past twenty-seven years must have thought of as the justification for his continued existence. Trapped under his dead weight and that scratchy Navajo blanket, she wonders at being the victim of ambiguous truths and gravitational forces.

The downpour fades into faint echoes of drainpipe-trickles before Mulder’s tears dry out and the sobs stop wreaking through his chest. As the aquarium filter whirs on, his breathing calms; and his heartbeat does, centimetres from hers.

“Don't leave,” he mumbles when she stirs, tightening his embrace until her ribs feel like they're about to crack. He’s always loathe to let her go after sex, and his rising intonation combined with that sniffle is almost enough to make her stay.

Then again, not even a death in the family is enough to make her risk suffocation or a UTI. She pokes him in the side. “I just need to pee,” she reassures. “Five minutes.”

Staggering into the bathroom, she locks the door behind her but leaves the faucet be; she's a big girl. Flushes, washes, wipes dried semen from her inner thighs with one washcloth and removes the last of her makeup with another.

In front the mirror, the Oxford crest crumbles as she lifts up the hem of her sweatshirt. His. She runs a finger over the purpling marks on her breasts, the indentations left by his teeth in an incomplete circle around her areola. Even as she bites her lip not to whimper, her nipple tightens. Jesus—well, Mulder's bathroom has always been cold, hasn't it, and either way her five minutes are up. She swallows a mouthful of water from the faucet and hurries back, forgetting at first to slide the latch open before yanking on the doorknob.

Mulder’s eyes flit from the Casio to her face. “Five minutes and forty-two _seconds,_ miss,” he croaks while she pulls her panties back on under his scrutiny. He scoots in towards the backrest and lifts the blanket; then, as she climbs in, purrs in her ear. “Missed you.”

In reality the couch is not made to accommodate two people lying down, least of all side by side facing each other, but Mulder's always found pleasure in bending it—reality, that is. They make it work with a tangle of limbs and no space between them.

Scully nuzzles the coarse hair on his chest and revels in the musky scent of him. Places open-mouthed kisses over his heart. “I'm _here,_ ” she tells him again. “I'm right here.”

This is where she is: if he has been wrenched apart, she intends to seep into every single fracture and solidify.

-

 _Come in,_ he beams, _come in, welcome to the home of the FBI's most unwanted._ She means to tell him how very wanted he is, but then he grins wider. _Watch out,_ he says, _that's my little sister,_ and eight-year-old Samantha crashes into Scully's hip.

 _Dana! Fox has told me so much about you,_ the girl laughs. She drags Scully through the house, braids swinging. _Come, you should meet our parents._

In the sunroom, Teena is sitting in a wheelchair by the windows. Blood-stained bandages peek out from her neckline. _I can't,_ Scully hears herself protest, _she wouldn't want to see me. My God, Mulder—do you even know what I’ve done to her?_

 _Oh, that,_ he shrugs, coming up behind her. _There’s no need for you to worry, she doesn’t remember. Since the stroke, you know—_

 _Don’t,_ Samantha snaps. She starts ondoing her braids. _You know Father doesn’t like it when we talk about that._

 _Is he—oh…_ Scully has to swallow a moan when Mulder’s hands travel from her waist, up; under her sweatshirt to palm her breasts. She should stop him, but Teena’s stare is so vacant and Samantha doesn’t seem to notice her brother’s actions at all. Her _adult_ brother—Jesus, there’s something wrong here. _Is Bill here, too?_

Mulder chuckles low in her ear, and she can feel the rumble in his chest, the slow grind of his hips against her backside. _No…_

 _Not Bill,_ Samantha stresses, jumping to open the French doors. She pirouettes on the way, hair whipping and nightgown whirling. _Our true Father._

A cloud of smoke wafts into the room, shrouding the man as he steps closer. _Hello, Agent Scully,_ C.G.B. Spender rasps. _I want you to stop looking._

Scully jerks, the back of her head connecting with Mulder's chin as her eyes fly open.

“Ouch,” he mumbles. Takes her earlobe between his lips. Her back is flush against his chest and he's got one bare leg thrown over her thigh; one hand tracing patterns on her belly and the other snaking around from beneath. He thumbs her nipple. “Is this alright?”

“Mmm, s’fine.” Christ, it should be, shouldn’t it. She’s done this before, woken him up with wandering hands and a hungry mouth; claimed territory while he’s still caught in dreamland. She breathes and tries to force the tension from her body. “Careful, though. Sore.”

“I’m sorry.” He nips along the tendon in her neck and lets the waistband of her panties snap against her skin as he works them off of her. Sneaks two fingers down to play in her already dripping slit. _Christ._

“Don't be. Don’t worry, it’s fine, m’fine,” she rambles as he sinks first one, then both fingers into her, making kick and twitch and dig her nails into the skin of his forearm wrapped around her. “How— _ah,_ God—how are you feeling?”

He groans when she rubs her ass against his cock. “Don't know. I don't want to talk about it, I just want to make you feel good.” He works his knee between her legs while the pad of his thumb finds her clit, and surely she'd marvel at this; his long digits and contortionist's ways, if only she didn't know him—what he does to reality and her heart rate. “Am I making you feel good, baby?”

“ _Baby,_ ” she pants, feeling herself flushed and flooded. This is not how it should be, but she feels… she feels… _good_ does not come _close_ to describe it _._ She claws at his arm, his thigh, his shoulder. Tugs on his hair. “Kiss me.”

He abandons her breasts to help tilt her head back with a finger under her chin. Then he kisses her—deep, deep, deep, swallowing her every moan and whimper as he puts his wrist into fucking her deeper yet. Her toes curl against his calves; she does, one vertebra at a time until he pulls her back in, breaking their kiss but keeping her in place so he can watch her face while she comes, she supposes. Eyes rolled back, she wouldn’t know, but over her own keening she hears _beautiful,_ hears _sweet,_ hears _fuck._

She’s still rippling with it when he pushes into her, when she grapples for his wrist; anything to pull him on top of her as she rolls to her stomach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a wip! while several of the remaining chapters are written to various degrees of completion, i am stupit and don't know when i'll post them.


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